It is seductive to think that the Russian war in Ukraine—and NATO’s sluggish response—is a crisis wholly tied to Russian nationalism and power politics. But in reality, the current crisis is neither simply a function of personal leadership nor political decision-making. As this crisis slowly expands and escalates, we must look at the deeper and far more consequential forces at work upon which the future of Europe—and Ukraine—rest. Russian President Vladimir Putin deals in the currency of force and power. He has found the nations of Europe to be weak, self-indulgent, irresolute, and intestinally unfit for confrontation.

DAVID SPEEDIE: I'm David Speedie, director of the program on U.S. Global Engagement at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. This is another in our series of Ethics in Security bulletins and I'm delighted to welcome today back to the Carnegie Council, Charles Freilich.

World leaders are meeting Tuesday at the United Nations for a summit that is intended to set the stage for global negotiations later this year in Lima and next year in Paris, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the threat of global climate change. The negotiations are at an important crossroad.

For much of the past six years, President Obama has talked about working toward a world without nuclear weapons. Yet his administration is now investing tens of billions of dollars in modernizing and rebuilding America’s nuclear arsenal and facilities, as The Times reported in detail on Monday. And after good progress in making nuclear bomb material more secure around the world, Mr. Obama has reduced his budget requests for that priority. This is a shortsighted and disappointing turn.

President Obama’s plan for dealing with ISIS is a step in the right direction, albeit one that doesn’t go far enough. That’s because ISIS is the symptom and immediate threat, not the primary problem: The Middle East is a fundamentally ill region, one that has repeatedly exported its problems to the United States and the rest of the world and will continue to do so for decades. Iran’s Islamic revolution, Saddam’s rapacious Iraq, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hezbollah, and Hamas, the slaughter in Syria, Darfur. The litany goes on.